Self-Made Man (25 page)

But then, slimy or not, some people just wouldn't give you an inch. One guy who had a guard dog that circled the car as we pulled up to the house, told us to get lost right away. “Don't even get out of the car,” he said. This set Ivan going.

“Motherfucker,” he said. “Call that dog over here.”

He whistled to the dog as he turned the car around in the driveway. He sucked a wad of snot down from his nose into his throat as he tried to get the dog to come by his door, but the dog wouldn't come close enough. Ivan spit toward him but missed, saying, “When guys are like that, I like to spit on their dogs, a nice big loogie right in the face. It really pisses them off.”

That was the scummiest side of Ivan, and in the car with me he let it out full blast in a hail of vitriol that never seemed to let up. He had an answer for everything.

After he told me the raw story I said, “Ivan, how many women have you slept with?”

“Seventy-four,” he said without hesitation.

Again, probably a giant lie, but who knew?

Ivan also claimed to have an IQ of 180 and a nine-inch dick. But don't they all, at least to each other.

I asked him about what he liked in a woman and he said something that confirmed with startling precision what I'd heard from other men and had myself surmised from my experiences in the strip clubs.

“It's probably from watching a lot of porn when I was a kid,” he said, “but I expect the pussy to be odorless and tasteless.”

Just like a doll, I thought. Just like a plastic Barbie doll. Nothing you'd ever find in nature.

On our way back to the office that night—our time in the field finished at eight p.m.—we talked this subject over with Troy. He said, “I'm fine with the pussy so long as it tastes like pussy. If it's skanky then we have a problem.”

Then he launched into a speech about how he could have any one of the women at the office if he wanted her. No one challenged him on this. It was like the IQ, big-dick thing. You didn't mess with a man's line. It was just part of the gig. When he was done telling us about what a lady-killer he was, Troy said he had a joke for us.

“Why does the blonde have a bald pussy?” he asked.

“Why?” Ivan and I said in unison.

“Ever seen grass on a highway?” said Troy.

 

Each day in the field ended with another gathering back at the office for settle-ups. To settle-up with management, you logged the number of entertainment books (or applications, or VIP cards) you had sold for the day, took your cut of the proceeds, and gave the rest to the bosses. At Clutch each set of entertainment books (we sold them in sets of two) cost $40, $13 of which went to the salesman, $10 to the direct manager, and the rest to upper management and various clients for whom the books were also making money. So, if on a given day you sold six sets of books, you made a total of $240, $78 of which went directly into your pocket that very evening in the form of cold, hard cash. The other $162 went out the window and up the stairs.

Selling six sets was a respectable day's work. Selling ten was mighty fine, and for this privilege you got to ring the cast-metal bell, which was kept at the front of the rumpus room for end-of-day celebrations. When you rang the bell, you got high fives and congratulations all around from the managers and the rest of the sales force. Congratulations usually came in the form of a Red Bull acronym—JUICE, which stood for Join Us In Creating Excitement. Everything good was JUICE, and every accomplishment was “JUICE by this” or “JUICE by that.” If you rang the bell you were greeted with a chorus of “JUICE by Ned, JUICE by Ned.” As I said, it was like being in a men's locker room postgame.

So even on a very, very good day—selling ten sets of books took a lot of hustle and didn't happen very often—you'd only make $130, and when you spread that over the eleven-hour day, you were only making $11.81 an hour pretax. On an average day when you sold maybe five books, you made $65. That made an hourly wage of $5.90, just barely above minimum wage, and that without benefits of any kind. You were employed as an independent contractor, which meant that you were expected to pay your own quarterly taxes. It also meant that the company didn't officially employ you, which in turn meant that they didn't have to pay you an hourly minimum wage, or offer you medical benefits or paid vacation. In short, you were a legal slave, hoping upon hope one day to earn your forty acres and a mule.

 

At the end of my first day, which was technically only my second interview, Ivan gave me a stellar recommendation, and Davis and Dano offered me a job on the spot. They wanted to know if I could start work the next day. The next day was Saturday, a normal workday at Clutch. I said I could. They were having an interoffice sales conference in the morning, and I didn't want to miss that show.

Dano was a savvy slave driver. He knew that in order to keep his crew making money for him, he had to motivate them enough to take the initiative but play on their insecurities enough to control them. To accomplish this he used a double technique. Push them from one end by exacerbating their greed and desperation to acquire the almighty dollar and the lifestyle that comes with it, and at the same time pull them from the other end by threatening their already piss-poor self-esteem. So, he would imply, if you succeed at this you'll be one of the big guys. You'll have everything that I have. If you fail, you'll be a quitter, a nobody, a loser. It was a very effective combination. Every morning he or Davis would give a speech on this order, publicly rewarding the high rollers from the previous day, and solidly rebuking the sore losers. That's what morning office culture was all about, keeping people's heads above water and kicking them in the ass so that they would go out for one more egregious day and trudge the territory with sloppy, gleaming grins on their faces.

Saturday was a special gathering of all the Clutch sales folk in the metropolitan area, probably about a hundred people in all, only 10 percent of whom were women. Ten percent at the most. We met at nine a.m. in a warehouse in a suburb near our office. For the first hour Ivan and I mingled with the rest of the reps. Ivan introduced me around as the new guy, and I got a lot of welcoming slaps on the shoulder and hearty handshakes from droves of execrably clad men. Every one of them looked like the black sheep son of some family, resentfully cleaned up for church because their dads had dragged them there under penalty of grounding. Most of them wore button-down shirts and ties, and some form of khakis, a nod to management dress codes, but every garment looked as if it had been slept in.

Whispering in my ear, Ivan gave me the lay of the land. He pointed at a pudgy middle-aged black guy in a suit, one of the very few older guys in the company. He had a thin, carefully trimmed, graying mustache, which, as Ivan told it, the other reps had long been telling him to shave.

“We tell him it makes him look cheap, but he won't shave it,” said Ivan, “because, get this, his mother tells him that it makes his mouth look so good it could be a pussy.”

I thought I had misheard. “His
mother
told him that?” I asked.

“Yep.”

The guy in question pushed his way toward us in the crowd. He was one of those people who gets right up in your face when he shakes hands.

“Hey, new guy,” he said, grasping my hand, and spreading his best spittle-moistened salesman's smile all over me like a coating of snot.

“Hi,” I said, looking away.

“Now that chick over there,” resumed Ivan, pointing to a tall, skinny blonde in mules and a miniskirt, “she's eighteen and pregnant, and all she wants to do is fuck. My one goal for the day is to do her tonight.”

He was living up to his nickname, RDK, which stood for Raw Dog King. Davis had crowned him this after a night of boozing it up together at a bar. At some point in the evening, Ivan had left the bar with his chick pick of the evening, and was seen fucking her between two cars in the parking lot.

“Yeah,” said Davis about the incident, “he was raw doggin' her all night.” I gathered that raw doggin' meant you didn't even bother to warm her up, or as they might have put it, lube her up with a little foreplay before you rammed it in her, probably without a condom. According to company lore this was standard practice for Ivan. On “dates” he was like a drive-through wrecking crew, hence the fast-food moniker Raw Dog King. It sounded like a hoagie shack by the side of the road, the kind that would give you dysentery for life.

As we meandered through the groups of guys, invariably we happened on a conversation about one of the few women in the room—which ones were fuckable and under what circumstances. Troy was going to work on them. He slid away from us toward a couple of girls from one of the other offices. They seemed to be clinging to each other for comfort and support. Apparently, as one of the guys standing around with us was good enough to inform me, some of the girls from one of our sister offices had formed their own sales team and called themselves The Swallows. All the guys in my circle chortled at this.

“We can't figure out if they know what it means or not,” said one of them.

God, I thought. These poor girls have no idea what they're dealing with, and now that I know, I wish I didn't.

Ivan's attention had drifted to other prey. He pointed out the ass of a very short girl standing about ten feet away on our left.

“Check that out,” he said. “I'd do her. She used to be a figure skater. Nice tight little body.”

The crowd was calming at Davis's command. He was indicating with his arms that we should form a circle against the walls of the warehouse and take a seat so that Dano could give his speech. Ivan and I were already against a wall, so we squatted. The figure skater was still standing. Ivan elbowed me, nodding toward her. “Now we have a good angle on her ass,” he said.

As Dano stepped into the middle of the circle, in seconds the atmosphere in the warehouse changed from brothel barroom to prayer meeting. All eyes were on the man and the crowd went silent.

“Hey, you,” yelled Dano.

“Hey, what,” yelled the crowd.

These were stock responses. The bosses of all the Red Bull companies started their morning meetings off this way. Dano occasionally varied the script slightly at our office during morning awards ceremonies when the high roller from the day before happened to have been a woman. After the “Hey, you,” “Hey, what” intro he'd say, “I got a guy.”

The staff would repeat, “We got a guy.”

“A highly motivated type a guy.”

Again the staff would repeat, though this time jumping toward the ceiling with their hands in the air when they said the word “highly.”

Then Dano again, “It's not a guy. It's a girl.”

And the staff in response: “Holy sheep.”

Dano loved this shit. You could tell he lived for it. He was like some high priest in a cult of free trade working himself into a froth for the faithful, justifying his greedy little enterprise with all the demagogic flair of a Jim Jones sans the Kool-Aid.

The script went something like this.